Most of us know what to expect, and how to behave, when we walk into a performance space. We settle our butts into seats. Squint at programs. Look up as the lights go down. If it's a play, we try to follow the story. If it's dull, we try not to nod off.

Except at EMPAC, where two events later this week promise to mess with our expectations — along with our heads. On Friday, entering "EXIT," the crowd will be handed pillows in the hopes they'll fall asleep. And on Saturday, an audience member at "HeadSwap" will don elaborate headgear, swap perspectives with an actor and submit to having her mind blown.

"There's no fixed classic narrative, with a beginning, a middle and an end," said Kurt Vanhoutte, a theater professor at the University of Antwerp and dramaturge for CREW, the Belgian arts collective behind "HeadSwap." Instead, the high-tech apparatus worn by participants "makes you kind of a co-author of the narrative."

Two participants — one actor and one crowd member — will wear goggles, omni-directional cameras and computer equipment. Everything they film, everything they "see," will be streamed into one another's goggles and experienced as a more-than-virtual reality. Both people will be onstage in EMPAC's Studio 1, their environments split by a screen displaying footage.

Person A, the audience member, might hold out her hand and observe it — filmed — through the headgear. But it wouldn't be her hand. It would be Person B's hand. Because Person B, the actor, will be subtly aping every behavior exhibited by Person A; whatever Person A does, Person B will mimic it, and Person A will perceive this mimicry as her own actions. Person A's perspective will be yanked and bent and stretched to include Person B.

"After a while, you get a kind of dialogue between the actor and the participant," said artistic director Eric Joris, chatting with his CREWmates earlier this week in a sunny office at EMPAC. "So you arrive at a kind of dance. You have a kind of negotiation." Vanhoutte reiterated the dance analogy. "You coordinate your own movements to try to get together with the movements of the other one. ... It can be quite sensual, in a way," he said.

Besides all the mind-melding, "HeadSwap" will also include script elements (from a story by Australian author Greg Egan) about a man who inhabits different bodies. Omni-directional footage from the city of Troy will likely be included, too. And, possibly, some toying around with time.

Vanhoutte calls the work "science fiction of the everyday life." The difference, said project manager and software designer Philippe Bekaert, is the absence of cheesy costumes, special effects, villainous overlords and other "cyber-fiction cliches."

"We hope to surpass virtual reality," Bekaert added, emphasizing the tension between nonfiction and fiction, theater and cinema, live and filmed. Their work plays with four states of being, he said: "Here and now; here and not now; not here and now; and not here and not now."

In other words, "HeadSwap" is a head trip. But that's business as usual for EMPAC, which makes a point of programming work that asks what it means to create art — and what it means to experience it. "Each one of these (artists) is questioning the format of theater or dance — and is putting the spectator in an active role," said Ash Bulayev, the curator for both events.

"I think, with each one of these projects, and with most of the remaining projects happening this season, most audience members will be able to ask — and mostly in a pleasant way, a positive way — 'Is this theater, is this an experiment, is this a lecture?'"

EMPAC director Johannes Goebel characterized "EXIT" and "HeadSwap" as "a perfect beginning" to the experimental venue's spring season, "as they show the extremes we are wandering in between at EMPAC ... and how we, as active humans, interpret the world every day anew."

Other events slated for the next few months include Allison Berkoy's "Untitled Apocalypse" on Feb. 22 (which promises: "There will be dummies and games. There will be an angel plunging into a pit of steel balls. There will be disasters of cataclysmic and infinitesimal scale"); Radiohole's "Inflatable Frankenstein" on March 22; and, on May 10, a dance piece from Lisbeth Gruwez incorporating the words of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.

For "EXIT," Belgian artist Kris Verdonck and choreographer Alix Eynaudi will use subtle manipulations of dance, lighting and sound to coax the audience to sleep. Bulayev has seen this in action (or inaction) at a previous performance — where, he said, he was given two pillows and three seats. One was for sitting. The others were buffers on either side, providing a comforting personal space for potential sleepers. That way, "there's no drooling on your shoulder" by some semi-conscious fellow audience member.

With "HeadSwap," CREW members expect some disorientation. They said the trade-off in perspective isn't meant to be frightening, but the experience can yield a powerful sense of intimacy and trust. In Vanhoutte's words, there's something "radical" in the act of switching and sharing perspectives with another human being. "You're connected to this other person, in this immersive constellation, and suddenly you feel an awkward feeling. ... It's a feeling that lifts you up for a few seconds."

This is "transcendental," he said. "Mystical." "Out-of-body," even. But there's nothing supernatural or metaphysical about it: It's all cognitive science, yet more proof that the brain has ways of cobbling together a view of the world from all available input.

Or, as Joris put it: "You have one leg in reality, and you have one leg somewhere else. And you are continually going between the two realities. That's the beauty of it."